Writing in the NYT Michelle Goldberg's "Pigs All the Way Down, Brett Kavanaugh and Our Rotten Ruling Class, " spins into a death spiral:
Regardless of what happens to Kavanaugh, however, this scandal has given us an X-ray view of the rotten foundations of elite male power. Despite Donald Trump’s populist posturing, there are few people more obsessed with Ivy League credentials. Kavanaugh’s nomination shows how sick the cultures that produce those credentials — and thus our ruling class — can be.
--Michelle Goldberg
The problem with Goldberg's formulation is she apparently has little first hand experience with that "ruling class," or at least with the institutions which pretend to provide the "ruling class" for our nation.
Her screed is a sort of psychologist's textbook of a complex which suffers her to resent those she perceives as feeling superior to her.
Having drifted into the Ivy League, the Phantom would hardly describe any of the three different institutions he spent time in as being the incubator of a ruling class or even as being particularly "elite."
Hanah Arendt, observing the head Nazis at Nuremberg, was struck by "the banality of evil." None of these men appeared to be particularly remarkable.
I felt the same way in the halls of Ivy. To be sure, there were some very bright people skulking about, and the occasional person who seemed to be operating on a plane somewhere above the ordinary, but for the most part, the students and even many of the faculty seemed quite unremarkable, uninspiring and very ordinary.
Andrew Hacker, whose own credentials included Amherst, Princeton and Oxford taught at Cornell and Princeton and he tried to write a book tracking the fates of the members of the Princeton class of 1961, describing the students of that class, who he taught, as being the most dismal collection of mediocrities he had ever run across. Princeton refused to cooperate and he could never get the book off the ground. Hacker surmised a large number of the graduates never amounted to much and Princeton was determined to bury that sad truth. After all, Princeton was in the business of selling success, or selling the idea that a Princeton diploma was the punched ticket to wealth and success if not fame.
Many on Twitter and in the NY Times have expressed shock at the description of Yale students in Kavanaugh's class.
The Phantom saw nothing surprising in any of the accounts of his college days.
If anything, these stories sounded more eventful than what the Phantom saw in those humdrum corridors of pretend power and status.
In fact, it is notable Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg did not hang around long at Harvard. To it's credit, Harvard selected these two future stars for admission. But once there, these two looked around and said, "I can do better."
There is a possibly apocryphal story about Tony Fauci, now the director the the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, one of those guys who helped bring HIV to heel. When offered the glittering prize of admitting privileges and a faculty appointment at the Cornell New York Hospital Medical Center he declined, saying, "Someday I'm going to be very rich or very famous, but if I stay here, I'll be neither."
That summarized the Phantom's impression of the Ivy League. Well behaved youngsters (at least outside of their dormitories) who would never make waves.
Regardless of what happens to Kavanaugh, however, this scandal has given us an X-ray view of the rotten foundations of elite male power. Despite Donald Trump’s populist posturing, there are few people more obsessed with Ivy League credentials. Kavanaugh’s nomination shows how sick the cultures that produce those credentials — and thus our ruling class — can be.
--Michelle Goldberg
The problem with Goldberg's formulation is she apparently has little first hand experience with that "ruling class," or at least with the institutions which pretend to provide the "ruling class" for our nation.
Her screed is a sort of psychologist's textbook of a complex which suffers her to resent those she perceives as feeling superior to her.
Having drifted into the Ivy League, the Phantom would hardly describe any of the three different institutions he spent time in as being the incubator of a ruling class or even as being particularly "elite."
Hanah Arendt, observing the head Nazis at Nuremberg, was struck by "the banality of evil." None of these men appeared to be particularly remarkable.
I felt the same way in the halls of Ivy. To be sure, there were some very bright people skulking about, and the occasional person who seemed to be operating on a plane somewhere above the ordinary, but for the most part, the students and even many of the faculty seemed quite unremarkable, uninspiring and very ordinary.
Andrew Hacker, whose own credentials included Amherst, Princeton and Oxford taught at Cornell and Princeton and he tried to write a book tracking the fates of the members of the Princeton class of 1961, describing the students of that class, who he taught, as being the most dismal collection of mediocrities he had ever run across. Princeton refused to cooperate and he could never get the book off the ground. Hacker surmised a large number of the graduates never amounted to much and Princeton was determined to bury that sad truth. After all, Princeton was in the business of selling success, or selling the idea that a Princeton diploma was the punched ticket to wealth and success if not fame.
Many on Twitter and in the NY Times have expressed shock at the description of Yale students in Kavanaugh's class.
The Phantom saw nothing surprising in any of the accounts of his college days.
If anything, these stories sounded more eventful than what the Phantom saw in those humdrum corridors of pretend power and status.
In fact, it is notable Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg did not hang around long at Harvard. To it's credit, Harvard selected these two future stars for admission. But once there, these two looked around and said, "I can do better."
There is a possibly apocryphal story about Tony Fauci, now the director the the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, one of those guys who helped bring HIV to heel. When offered the glittering prize of admitting privileges and a faculty appointment at the Cornell New York Hospital Medical Center he declined, saying, "Someday I'm going to be very rich or very famous, but if I stay here, I'll be neither."
That summarized the Phantom's impression of the Ivy League. Well behaved youngsters (at least outside of their dormitories) who would never make waves.
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